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Friday, June 05, 2009

This Week On Real Housewives Of The Chicanes

You don't get much Formula One news over here. There's this brief note today about possible breakaway series for next year. And a somewhat amusing threat to suspend Force India for already lodging it's 2010 entry. Because things could get worse for that team? Poor Force India. (Note: the bitchy teams seem to be the ones that should be good because of their engines and sponsors but seem to have been sucking wind for most of the season. I suppose if I were Ferrari I wouldn't be taking the season gracefully either. I imagine I'd say something like, "I'm flippin' Ferrari, don't you see my red car? Get the hell out of my way," except in Italian, delivered with a smoldering look and immediately followed with the emotive swigging of a fine lambrusco and the smashing of glasses.)

p.s. If you look, there's more. In the NYT of course. Because NYT readers are rich elitists who prefer schmancy euro racing to vulgar American Nascar crap. (j/k) And there's a more in-depth analysis of the current poo-storm here. Also, is paracarro an insult? I shouldn't have quit taking Italian class. Renault is kinda coming off like an a-hole here:

“Our drivers are, or have been, world champions, and then you have a driver who was almost retired, and another who is a ‘paracarro,’ fighting for the championship,” Flavio Briatore told the Gazzetta dello Sport, referring to one of the winning team’s drivers, the veteran Rubens Barrichello, as “almost retired” and using the Italian word for curbstone to describe the other, the championship leader, Jenson Button. “I don’t know how we can say we have credibility.”

I suppose if I didn't have a diffuser and all the teams with diffusers were winning . . . . Also, some argue that F1's squabbles are great for the sport: Jane Nottage, editor of Paddock, a motor-sport business and lifestyle magazine, said the scandals induced fans to follow the sport between races:

“The intrigue and the fights and the battles on and off the track is something that people like,” she said. “Whereas with Nascar they’ve only created race-by-race interest — the race finishes and there’s no real incentive to follow it. You want to know who’s going to win, but here there’s more bite and intrigue and gossip to it.”

So F1 is . . . going all The Hills on us?

And also, F1 thinks your Nascar is lame:

“There are more scandals in Formula One because the media makes more scandals,” Bourdais said, noting that no other racing series is covered as intensively by the media. “But if you look at what happens in the United States, for example, with Nascar or other series, with yellow caution flags that come out when a guy has more than five seconds lead or is about to lap everyone, no, I don’t think there is more injustice here.”